By these standards, are any citation managers adapted to modern use? I’m definitely open to the idea that we should change how we refer to other findings, but EndNote, Zotero, and the like also can’t save you from new editions, overly-strict rules about reference formatting, and bad publisher-provided information. If you can deviate slightly from a particular reference format, it’s fairly easy to emit either a DOI or…
The alternative is to just write the bibliography by hand. This means possibly having to make changes before final publication to adapt to the journal's style. But it is faster in my experience than getting things into bibtex pre-emptively, particularly as the latter doesn't reliably prevent problems at publication time. And it is sufficiently transparent that you don't have to deal with sneaky silent errors.
I have never found a silent error. If bibtex is not happy, it complains loudly. I use the style files given by the publishers and it always comes out OK. Never had a publisher complain about the bibliography when using their styles, and they do check, and complain about a lot of things.
Use `DeclarePairedDelimiter` from `mathtools`. The rule of TeX is that anything that is written in TeX is instantly old. Because people don't read what Knuth had in mind. TeX was the prototype not the production grade product. Still people refuse to get the message.
Well, Knuth still writes all his stuff using "plain" TeX. For example, the source of the TeXbook and the METAFONTbook are both TeX, not LaTeX or whatnot. Granted, he did create TeX, so he's probably more comfortable with it.
Pure TeXnicians are a thing. Besides, what do you expect him to use? it's his creation.
The point is he created TeX for himself and expected others to supercede it with a proper implementation. Didn't happen though.
Not a single mention of 'hbox' (I opened and immediately grepped) - surely the primary issue (or seemingly non-issue but annoying error/warning) anyone runs into is 'overfull hbox', typically without any idea what an hbox even is anyway.
The linked post is not a comprehensive manual of LaTeX but just a collection of typesetting tips that the author found interesting. TeX is at heart a system for setting, breaking and laying out boxes. Each character (e.g. 'T' from font Helvetica, say) is a box, a paragraph is a sequence of these boxes (with "glue" for the words), which is broken into lines (each line is a hbox), which are assembled into paragraphs an…
> The linked post is not a comprehensive manual of LaTeX but just a collection of typesetting tips that the author found interesting.
I realise that, I suppose I was partly joking, but partly did assume 'common mistakes and advice' would mention it; it's extremely common.
"here are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well." not there are not. Apart from TeXmacs I know of no editor which give you on the screen the same result you get on the paper. LyX has not such a feature. If an approximation is ok, then fine, but I do not think you can call it WYSIWYG. Is something else. And it requires a lot of work to do it correctly. You should at least appreciate the technical merits, even if you prefer…
As a fellow mathematician you may then appreciate the fact that local and global maxima may differ dramatically which pretty much precludes true WYSIWYG (not just in TeX) in that you have to settle for one of the two: visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX) or perfect results that you have to compile with some delay. It has nothing to do with the computational power available but…
> visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX)
Till now I took the developers word that the aesthetics of TeXmacs is better than the one of TeX and I would be curious to know where the opposite is true (and in case also why this cannot change)
Many LaTeX tricks only get passed down from advisors to students, or from collaborators to collaborators. Rarely someone would look for how to improve their typesetting when all they want is to quickly communicate content. It be nice if content and typesetting can be completely separated, where I just write content, and something (LaTeX, AI, some manual typesetter) does all the typesetting. Also, should I be the one…
check out MonsterWriter
Just tried it. Does it support theorem environments?
As a fellow mathematician you may then appreciate the fact that local and global maxima may differ dramatically which pretty much precludes true WYSIWYG (not just in TeX) in that you have to settle for one of the two: visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX) or perfect results that you have to compile with some delay. It has nothing to do with the computational power available but…
> visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX) Till now I took the developers word that the aesthetics of TeXmacs is better than the one of TeX and I would be curious to know where the opposite is true (and in case also why this cannot change)
From what I have seen in TeXmacs documentation, they have implemented pretty much every feature of TeX's linebreaking algorithm and more (microtypography, global page breaking, etc) so my claim above was not to say that the documents TeXmacs outputs have suboptimal aesthetics (to be fair, modern versions of TeX have all of these features, as well, although not the original TeX, alas). What I meant to say was there is no (even theoretically) possible way to have a perfect WYSIWYG editor if global paragraph/page breaking is desired. For example, due to global page breaking, one may be editing a line in the middle of the document and its position on the page (and the page number, left/right headers, etc) will be constantly changing---not good for the visual experience. I do not know how TeXmacs deals with these (extremely rare, admittedly) cases but the discussion was about the true WYSIWYG vs not so take it with a grain of salt. Let me say this again: TeXmacs is an outstanding piece of software. If in thirty years, a TeXmacs file format is still readable by the newest version (possibly with some easy tweaks), I will consider switching from TeX :). My other (minor) concern is that the LaTeX files that TeXmacs exports do not render at all as the pdf files TeXmacs produces itself. So as a WYSIWYG frontend to LaTeX, TeXmacs is ... not quite. Which they never claimed to be so I cannot fault them for this.
Most of this is good advice, but I don't see the \mathbbm vs. \mathbb distinction as anything other than subjective taste. Also, I use things like \newcommand{\abs}[1]{\left| #1 \right|} in the preamble. This way, I can use \abs{...} without any asterisks, and it automatically adjusts its size. In the 1% situations where I don't want it to adjust the size, I write the delimiters manually. Making maths look good in La…
I use Zotero with the better bibtex addon. Works great. When I first started using zotero, I imported my existing bibtex library, so all my existing bibtex keys all worked. I use zotero as my library for everything and add bibtex keys to things I cite.
The way I see it, this only proves my point. As you write: '...None of them have become the standard...' and this is at the center of the argument. TeX may not be ideal but it strikes the correct balance to become and stay standard for so many years. One can do pretty much anything in bare Postscript (and I am ashamed to admit, I have) or even 'handmade' PDF but it does not make it a good alternative to TeX. I have e…
I disagree. I think Latex will soon become legacy like Cobol. HTML and CSS basically do a lot more than Latex does - except for maths things - and are far more widely known, and far more forgiving. Also importantly, they support hyperlinks, animations, and inline interactive scripts. It seems that HTML and CSS with the appropriate CSS styles and shorthands (like Markdown) could eat up everything that Latex does and m…